Using Text via Dialectical Journals to Nurture Liminal Spaces in Teacher Education

This article shares the findings of a study examining the use of dialectical journals as liminal spaces for the development of critical reflection in practicing teachers. In an online graduate course on critical teacher inquiry designed to foster teachers as antiracist multicultural educators, teachers engaged in dialogue with themselves as they responded to self-selected text segments in assigned readings throughout the course. Using Mezirow’s theory of transformation and specifically the typology of critical reflection of assumptions and critical self-reflection of assumptions, we analyzed the online dialectical journals of 23 teachers to better understand how their engagement with key texts both represented and influenced their reflective development and engagement in transformational learning. We conclude the journals to be powerful liminal spaces for teachers to engage in reframing of their assumptions.

“Moving the Rubble”: Reflection, Conscientization, and Transformative Learning With Men Incarcerated for Organized Crime in Mexico

While many scholars have examined transformative learning in different prison education programs, the field has only recently reached Latin America. This article presents a participatory action research project which has been operating in a prison for men accused of organized crime in Jalisco, Mexico, since 2018. The analysis is based on testimonies related to personal and collective transformation in a context of multifaceted oppression. It also explores the blurry lines between reflection, conscientization, and transformation, inviting us to consider how transformative education relates to social stigma and freedom.

Challenging Students to Engage Meaningfully Across Ideological Differences

As college student educators, we notice a pattern of difficulty in our students’ ability to engage meaningfully across ideological differences. In this work, we posit the social media mindset’s penchant for reductive framing and outgroup shaming as a potential diagnosis of the problem. We explore how these tendencies show up in the classroom; we present alternative frameworks for stimulating better conversations across differences. These frameworks include promoting democratic civility (as opposed to niceness), understanding ourselves as works in progress (as opposed to engaging call-out and cancel culture), and creating the conditions for the call-in (as opposed to “ducking diversity”).

Whither Transformative Education? Taking Stock Well into the Twenty-First Century

This article develops a framework for this special issue of JTE, and assesses the assessment of transformative learning. What and whom are the contributors assessing? For what ends? And how effectively? The call for manuscripts cited two “megatrends” in the transformative learning literature: 1. The importance of deep and transformative learning experiences that profoundly affect adult learners’ sense of self and their relationships and behavior in their community and broader world; 2. The need to clearly document these learning experiences and interventions and rigorously assess their outcomes, both proximal and distal. In what follows, I pose questions that these trends suggested to me and use them to take stock of transformative learning theory and education in the 21st century. At the end of each section, I synthesize what I found to be relevant from my review of the articles in this issue, highlighting what I see to be major contributions.

“I felt as if I was becoming myself anew”: Transformative Learning Through Action Research Projects Carried out by Beginner Teachers

This article explores action research as a tool for promoting transformative learning of prospective teachers. Drawing on two B.A. or M.A. projects carried out at a university in Poland in which teacher-students used action research and the educational ethnography design to examine themselves as teachers and their practice, the article demonstrates the potential of such an approach for the transformation of students’ meaning perspectives and, eventually, of their personal and professional identities. The transformation the teacher-students experienced entailed their emancipation from the teaching models imposed on them in their institutions and the development of their personal teaching theories. This was followed by their transition to deliberate action, increased sense of agency, and readiness to assume responsibility for wider social change, consequently bridging the theory-practice divide. The author argues that despite the challenges of action research in the university context, its transformative potential makes it a valuable component of teacher education.

Using the Graphic Narrative to Stimulate Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory in Learners

This article describes a bounded action research case study that examines how reading and discussing a graphic narrative ( March Book Two, a comic autobiography of John Lewis’s life as a civil rights activist) enabled transformations in a group of seven adult student participants at a Canadian postsecondary institution. Data primarily gathered from photocopies of student work, including reflective journal entries, postsemester interviews, and the primary researcher’s daily reflexive and reflective research journal entries, were evaluated with Kitchenham and Chasteauneuf’s framework of assessing transformative learning with critical reflection types such as objective and subjective reframing of assumptions. The authors found that both the participants and the primary researcher engaged in a number of shifts, including engaging in systemic critical self-reflection of and on assumptions.

Illuminating Transformative Learning/Assessment: Infusing Creativity, Reciprocity, and Care Into Higher Education

In this article, the authors speak to the paradox of assessing transformative learning (TL) in higher education. TL theory, developed by Jack Mezirow, is a theory of learning to describe the process of change in how individuals view the world based on previous experiences. Recognizing that the 10 phases of Mezirow’s TL theory are fluid and intertwined, three prominent aspects resonated within the individual narratives: the importance of a disorienting dilemma, the qualities of self-reflection, and liberatory actions. By exploring the complexities, challenges, and possibilities encountered in their classrooms, the shared narratives reveal how students were engaged in TL and embedded within are holistic assessment processes the authors enacted with learners. Throughout this dialogical narrative inquiry focused on assessment, the authors underwent their own TL in the presence of each other, confessing uncertainties and vulnerabilities, thus showcasing the potential to transform understanding with and through reciprocal learning.